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The first thing I would say about collection is bear in mind that currently the extras for movies in a collection are grouped together so the hyperlink for any movie part of a set will be the same. Looking at your suggestions:
1. Would appear to work universally with all views.
2. This one would need to be altered for different views. There is no right-click in landscape, there is in lowlist for example. Maybe swap the left/right and up/ down controls for lowlist.
3. Could work, seems to be the simplest to implement, would keep them seperate from the regular controls but save you leaving the movie section. Not sure if it would work in kiosk mode though.
I'm slightly biased with regard to viewtypes, I'll admit for me there is only lowlist and Landscape w/logo. Using Landscape logo as an example, to navigate I currently have left/right to browse, enter to play movie, up for trailer, down just goes to the skip browse "thing" which is superflous IMO. Maybe change to left/right to browse, up for trailer, enter to play movie, down to go to extras. Down disabled for any movie without extras. Upon entering extras, escape would return you to movie browsing. Again, could swap the left/right and up/ down controls for lowlist.
If we were to do it this way then it may be better to keep movie extras on a "per film" basis rather than having them grouped in sets. Then you could keep them to one season and activate the "flatten" mode for seasons. One less menu to wade through.
Thoughts?
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2012-06-14, 20:06
(This post was last modified: 2012-06-14, 20:10 by thrak76.)
What if when you pressed "M" to get to the media player controls/misc. settings overlay, there was a button there that would take you to the extras. In this manner you could also switch to them if you got the notion while watching the movie.
Or... if while watching the film, bookmarks could be used to represent relevant extras as you're watching the film. This is a little out there - but reminiscent of the disc extras where a little icon would pop-up while you were watching, and if you hit enter you'd be taken to the extra.
But how to get back to the film after watching?
Oh, and how is "right-click" implemented on a remote control?
Why not have the extras also accessible in the same manner as trailers are when you bring up the infoscreen for a particular movie?
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I don't remember what thread I read this in, but if the extras were named in the same manner as trailers -
movie-extra.xyx
movie-extra1.xyz
movie-extra2.xyz
Then all the extras could be contained within the same folder as the movie. This kind of defeats all the work we put into the cool episode views for the extras though. I wonder if an extras button in the infoscreen could then bring up an episode viewtype (or similar) screen where the extras could be scrolled through?
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If it was to keep its current format, I think that naming format would be ideal. This confirms though that extras should be done for each film individually, this naming convention would not accommodate a collection.
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2012-06-15, 01:45
(This post was last modified: 2012-06-15, 01:49 by kaburke.)
Right-click = 'c' key. Not sure how various remotes would handle that. [edit]Right-click seems to work for me in Landscape. Are we not talking about the same thing? Am I messing up terminology?[/edit]
How are you able to make 'up' start the trailer? Aren't trailers now only accessible through the side menu (and not accessible in kiosk mode)?
And perhaps I'm lost here: but way does there need to be a naming convention for the folders? A movie is linked with it's extras TV show. You can either set up a different show for each movie in a collection, or, as we all seem to be currently doing, set up a show with separate seasons for each movie. Certainly, given some of the navigation options, it may make more sense to set each movie's extras up as a separate show.
Am I correct in understanding that, ideally, we would still like to be able to start the movie immediately, without having to go into another sub-view?
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I've started on a proof of concept script. I have to say that the documentation around all things XBMC is quite lacking. Trying to get a list of linked shows for a movie is proving difficult: I can't find the API methods that I need. I'm going to keep trying, but this could be very slow going until I can get up to speed.